Amid Family's Quarrels, A Home Worthy of Gatsby Begins to Crumble

By BRUCE LAMBERT

Published: August 26, 2007

CORRECTION APPENDED

For more than half a century, Marjorie Brickman Kern has lived in the main mansion at the Point, the grand estate on Long Island's Gold Coast that is believed by some to have inspired the fictional West Egg home of ''The Great Gatsby.''

The Point sits atop a 20-foot cliff in the village of Kings Point overlooking Long Island Sound, where sailboats glide through a panorama of bridges and lighthouses against the backdrop of the Connecticut shore and the Manhattan skyline.

These days, Mrs. Kern, an 81-year-old widow, lives alone amid floors rotted in places and some paneless windows. Parts of the grounds -- which include a vineyard, a lily pond, a clay tennis court, a horse paddock, a squash court, a gym, a greenhouse and formal gardens -- are neglected and overgrown.

In legal documents and interviews, Mrs. Kern and one of her sons, Russell H. Handler, accuse her other son, F. John Handler, of costing her up to $16 million by tricking her into selling him her 22 percent share of the estate and foisting $1.7 million of his debt onto her. She said she had ''opacity in my vitreous -- in other words, I can't see'' and was unaware that she had signed the sales contract in 2002. ''If I had known,'' she said in an interview, ''I would not have entertained the idea.''

Russell Handler, 58, said that his mother's credit card, savings, checking and brokerage accounts were depleted and that he had spent thousands of dollars on household repairs and staples for her. He and his mother filed lawsuits this month accusing his brother of defrauding their mother and facilitating the government's seizure of a $98,000 bank account, which Russell had set up mainly for her, to pay off tax liens that he said John owed.

John Handler, 56, said Mrs. Kern willingly sold him her share of the property, and he accused his brother -- whom he called ''delusional'' -- of running up more than $30,000 in charges on their mother's credit card for his own benefit.

''He's coming to her rescue? It's absurd,'' said the younger brother, a lawyer, who lives with his two daughters in a new brick home at the edge of the cliff, separated from Mrs. Kern's mansion by a sloping lawn and a pool that is lined with one million white and blue marble tiles. ''I wish my brother well,'' he added. ''I just don't want to have anything to do with him and the madness that seems to surround him.''

The current skirmish is just the latest in a series of fights, shifting alliances and travails that seem to have cursed the family, and the Point, for decades.

Russell and John Handler, along with both their wives and several of the estate's tenants, have battled cancer. John Handler's wife, Jennifer, who was the principal pianist for the Long Island Philharmonic and heir to a real estate fortune, was found dead last year in the white-and-blue marble pool; the police declared it an accident. Jennifer's mother, Jean Eley, was killed when her car hit a tree near here in 1998. This year, John Handler nearly died from toxic sepsis and lost all his fingers and toes.

The paradox of the place is that it was envisioned as a family compound where succeeding generations could live together. Mrs. Kern's father, the late Herman Brickman, a high-powered labor arbitrator and sportsman, created an ownership cooperative in the late 1970s to make his vision a reality. But instead of drawing his descendants closer, the Point has torn them apart.

''It was rather idyllic, but a fool's paradise as it turned out,'' Mrs. Kern said in a recent interview. A decade ago, in an earlier stage of the family feud, she told The New York Times, ''My father's intent was that we all live in great harmony in a beautiful setting,'' but then ''avarice and greed took over.'' Earlier, other relatives accused her and John Handler of those same motives.

Touring the grounds where he grew up fishing and hunting and working on the property, Russell Handler mused, ''As families disagree, a dream is lost.''

''We expected to live here the rest of our lives,'' he said. ''Now this place has basically gone to ruin. Do you think this is what my grandfather envisioned?''

Today, the cooperative is more like a business than a family compound, with all but two of the nine residences rented to outsiders.

In the early 1980s, shortly before Herman Brickman died, control of the estate was transferred to John Handler and Mrs. Kern, cutting out her two brothers, Lionel and Richard Brickman, and their children. A dispute over the legitimacy of that transfer in Herman Brickman's will was settled by giving 26 percent to Richard's branch of the family. Then he wanted to sell that portion, provoking a new round of litigation.

A 1996 court decision found that John Handler ran the estate in a ''baronial'' manner, keeping few records and ignoring the minority shareholders. The judge directed that the cooperative be dissolved. John Handler and Mrs. Kern, arguing that they were trying to preserve the estate, appealed and won. After more legal wrangling, the losing side sold its share to John in 2004.

Correction: September 26, 2007, Wednesday
An article on Aug. 26 about the Point, an estate on Long Island's Gold Coast that is the subject of a bitter family dispute, misidentified the location where Jennifer Handler, the wife of F. John Handler, one of the owners, was found dead last year. It was an indoor pool, not the white-and-blue marble outdoor pool.

Because of an editing error, the article referred incorrectly to the transfer of the estate to Mr. Handler and his mother, Marjorie Brickman Kern. The transfer occurred shortly before the death of Mrs. Kern's father, Herman Brickman, in 1981, and was not in fact part of his will.